Building a Strong Brand: A Step-by-Step Guide to Establishing Your Business Identity
A strong brand is crucial for any business to make an impact in this competitive world. A brand well-defined can instil belief in your audience, retain customer loyalty and promote growth. Here is a step-by-step guide on how to build a strong brand.
1. Clearly Define Your Brand's Purpose, Values, Personality, and Target Audience
- Purpose: Why does your brand exist beyond turning a profit? It’s the core reason why you do what you do. What problems do you solve? What value do you bring to your customers?
- Values: These are what your company stands by – they are the guide for your company culture and the induction for the decisions that you make within your business. They need to be what will resonate with your target audience.
- Personality: the persona of your brand – in other words, the human attributes associated with your brand. It is the way you talk to your audience and the personality you have. Does your brand have a sense of humour? Is your brand serious? Is your brand very innovative, or more traditional and reliable?
- Target Market: Who is your audience? Knowing who your target audience is can have a significant impact – your whole effort may fail without sales, and without proper audience understanding, you might miss the mark. To better understand your target audience, build what we call the ideal customer profile (ICP) which aligns your company objectives with relevant individuals that you are connecting with, including their demographics and psychographics as a basis.
2. Understand Your Competition and the Needs and Preferences of Your Target Audience
- Competitive Analysis: Compare the features and capabilities of your product or service against competitors’ offerings, and note areas of differences and advantages. What makes you different from your competitors? What are their strengths and weaknesses? What is their general positioning among customers? Consider how the company brands itself, how reviews rate it, and its placement in the market.
- Audience research: Gather insights from your audience through surveys, focus groups, and other market research. If you know what they want, you can better tailor your product or service – and your marketing messages – to fit what they desire.
3. Consistently Deliver High-Quality Products or Services
- Quality Assurance: Great products and services are what set a solid brand apart from others. Your products and services need to be consistent, in terms of standards, to build trust with your audience. Your products and services should reflect the same commitment to a high standard in every interaction of a customer with your business.
- Customer Feedback: Listen and respond to feedback from customers. Use this valuable information to further differentiate your offerings and constantly refine them. Customers respond positively to brands that are willing to listen to them.
4. Develop a Strong Visual Identity
- Logo and Design: Your logo might be the first thing people see to learn about your brand – make sure it’s something to remember (and that it matches your brand personality). Everything from your website to your social media, packaging and promotional materials should reflect your brand’s visual identity.
- Brand Colours and Typography: Select colours and typefaces that reflect your brand’s personality and ideals. Maintain continuity in their use to enhance your brand’s visual identity.
5. Create a Compelling Brand Story
- Storytelling: a brand story will make your brand more human and accessible to your audience. Tell the story of how your company began, what obstacles you had to face and how you found the internal motivation to continue. Focus on being authentic.
6. Utilize Digital Marketing Strategies
- Website: Your website can be where your brand lives beyond the label itself. Make sure you have an easy, attractive and search engine-optimised site that speaks volumes about your brand with great content.
- Social Media: This is self-explanatory really. You have to use them. Every social media platform – Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Snapchat – offers some way in which the brand owner might tell (or at least suggest) their story, and illustrate their artefacts (‘products’, would be a good way to put it). Multiple posts ‘pinning’ the brand to relevant pages in social media can increase customer loyalty.
- Content Marketing: Create interesting and informative content such as blog posts, videos, infographics and podcasts that serve to educate, entertain or solve a problem for the people in your audience.
7. Build Strong Relationships with Your Customers
- Customer service: Superior customer service is a powerful brand differentiator and decision-maker for loyalty. A good customer service policy is responsive, sensitive and proactive to the needs of the customer.
- Brand Loyalty: Get your customers to use your products or services regularly and form strong connections with your brand. These customers are more likely to recommend others to use your products and less likely to switch to competitors.
- Brand Association: Leverage your brand’s attributes (stability, higher growth, industry leadership, etc) to boost your company’s overall image. This could be achieved through rebranding exercises.
- Brand Dimensions: Uplift various brand attributes such as excitement, emotional appeal, indulgence, imagination, and fun.
- Differentiation: Set your brand apart with unique attributes, designs, quality, etc that are distinct from competitors. This helps achieve recognition and stand out amidst their products.
- Performance Connection: Strengthen the link between your brand and actual product performance to project quality. This is particularly appropriate for business-to-business brands.
- Monetary Value: Appropriate for certain categories such as fashion and automobiles, investing in brand activities can evaluate your intellectual property.
The best way to create a brand identity is by strategising. You should determine who you are, what you stand for, how you should communicate with your audience, who your ideal customer is, who your competitors are, what makes your products great, and what digital marketing platforms you should be using.
At Square Meters Digital our expertise is taking successful businesses to the next level, by typing out a brand new plan of attack into the screen of your smartphone or workplace desktop computer. Create a new brand, or enhance an existing one, with tailored digital marketing measures! Countdown to success: we’ll plan the clock from start to finish. So you can sell. Sell and sell again.
Continuously. Don’t be caught in the storm – We won’t ever scream or shout; we’ll work with you to maintain your brand. Create a brand or maintain your brand; We offer everything you need. But not everything has been said. Remember: maintain your brand. At Square Meters Digital we build brands. Visit our website for more details.
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